Fireman’s Ball re-release highlights lag in Czech film restoration

Since the advent of the DVD video format in the late 1990s, many countries
around the world have been re-mastering and restoring their respective
movie archives. With the relatively recent advent of high resolution
Blu-ray home movie technology, such restoration efforts have increased
exponentially. But, perhaps surprisingly, the Czech Republic lags far
behind its neighbours in this effort. While the Slovaks have restored
around eighty feature films, animated films and documentaries, only two
Czech films, The Fireman’s Ball – the restored version
of which was recently screened at the Karlovy Vary film festival – and
the 1967 movie Marketa Lazarová, have undergone such
rejuvenation. Dominik
Jun spoke with the director of the Czech National Film Archive, Michal
Bregant, about this discrepancy and began by asking about the restoration
of Miloš Forman’s iconic and highly allegorical New Wave film.

'Fireman’s Ball'
“What we did with The Fireman’s Ball was the same that we
did with
Marketa Lazarová last year. And that means digital
restoration, using the
original film elements from when the film was released. We want to achieve
the most authentic image and sound and present it just as the audience saw
it when it was first released.”

So scratches are removed, colour fading is corrected, those kinds of
things…

“Exactly. We never do any kind of improvements. We only try to restore
it so that it looks the way that it was authorized to look by the director
and director of photography.”

Will the restored movie be available to purchase on DVD and
Blu-ray?

“It will be released in theatres first and then I think later in the
autumn a Blu-ray disc will be available on the market.”

And you mentioned Marketa Lazarová, which was the first
Czech film to
undergo such restoration. Why have there been so few especially when we
compare it to Slovakia, which has restored about eighty?

'Marketa Lazarová'
“Or Poland. The reason is unfortunately all about money. Fortunately, we
are quite ahead of time in terms of the methodology and concept of digital
film restoration. But the Slovak Film Institute, they do it differently:
it
is less costly but mainly they have much more support from the government.
We have the support of the government too, via the Ministry of Culture,
but
the problem is that financially, this cannot be compared to the
Slovaks.”

And how much does such a restoration cost?

“This complete and high standard digital restoration comes to around one
million crowns per film.”

And there’s no purely commercial path that is viable, presumably.
Obviously when the DVD format emerged, a lot of Czech films came out but
they were evidently not re-mastered at all, but rather came off television
broadcast tapes. So why wasn’t re-mastering done at that point? Was
there
simply no money?

“Exactly. There was no money. The commercial success of Czech DVDs about
four or five years ago was quite overwhelming. People were buying those
cheap [Czech film] DVDs in huge amounts and it wasn’t just collectors
either. But that is not the situation nowadays; now the market for DVDs is
going down very steeply and we don’t really see any major future for
this
market. So we have to move towards Blu-ray discs and also think about the
online presentation of movies and so on.”

'All My Compatriots'And finally, there is apparently a list of around two-hundred films
that
have been selected for restoration, so what’s next?

“That is a good question. It depends on who will be financing it because
with Miloš Forman’s Hoří, má panenko, the initiative came
from the
Karlovy Vary film festival, but it was financed by a private investor. But
what is on our shortlist is the Vojtěch Jasný film All My
Compatriots
(Všichni dobří rodáci, 1968) and also a classic 1948 film from
director
Alfréd Radok called Distant Journey (Daleká cesta).”